The Writer August/September 2022

AROUND THIS TIME OF YEAR, MY freezer begins to look like something out of Stranger Things. The door groans under the weight of the salmon spines, marrow bones, pork jowls, and chicken organs; the light flickers feebly behind stacks of blood-red tomato sauce and ghostly parmesan rinds. One wrong move amidst the heaps of unidentifiable vegetables could very well send you into the Upside Down. Every harvest morning finds me pleading with the aging appliance, begging its weary, overstuffed contents to accept just one more head of cauliflower from the garden, just one more batch of roasted cherry tomatoes before the first frost arrives in earnest. In Alaska, we joke we don’t mind the dark of winter because it finally lets us get some damn sleep. But I find even…

Memory Into Memoir: A Writer’s Handbook BY LAURA KALPAKIAN “The memoir is not the story of what you know, it’s the story of how you learned it,” explains author and instructor Laura Kalpakian in this guide, which won the Gold Medal for Writing/Publishing at the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Chapter topics range from navigating memoir beginnings and scenic details to rendering remembered dialogue and narrative voice. “Anyone beginning a memoir – or floundering about in the middle or even toward the end – will thank their lucky stars to get Laura Kalpakian’s guide in their hands,” praises author Priscilla Long. Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative BY MELISSA FEBOS Melissa Febos examines the act of storytelling in this “mix of memoir and master class” on personal narratives. In…

Upcoming calls for submissions Creative Nonfiction: Sunday Short Reads submissions Editors of Creative Nonfiction seek previously unpublished submissions for their “Sunday Short Read” email, which features works of nonfiction under 1,000 words. A $3 reading fee is waived for subscribers of Creative Nonfiction and/or True Story. Payment: $50. Submit by Aug. 1. creativenonfiction.org/submissions Prairie Schooner: Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest Send imaginative essays of general interest under 5,000 words to Prairie Schooner for consideration in its annual summer nonfiction contest. This year’s guest judge is award-winning author Jerald Walker. The winning entry will receive $500 and publication. Submit by Aug. 1. prairieschooner.submittable.com West Trade Review: Fiction, creative nonfiction, poems West Trade Review editors welcome short fiction (up to 5,000 words), poetry (up to five poems), creative nonfiction (personal essays, memoir, literary…

FOR THE PAST FOUR DECADES, LINda Joy Myers – memoirist and president of the National Association of Memoir Writers – has worked as a therapist. She’s the author of The Power of Memoir: How to Write Your Healing Story and a staunch advocate of writing book-length memoir with all the therapeutic benefits the practice provides. “When you write a scene, you become your own character at an earlier time in your life walking through and reliving those scenes. When you do that, you put your life into a new perspective because you’re the narrator, and you’re the character in the scene at the same time,” she explains. “When we figure out how to begin our memoir, how to develop the middle, and how the story – but not our life…

LIKE MANY OTHERS, KAREN EDmonds began writing a novel in the midst of the pandemic. But she wrote it with the assistance of award-winning authors teaching for Stanford University’s Online Certificate Program in Novel Writing. “I liked the fact that it was laser-focused on novel writing and geared towards debut authors,” Edmonds says. “I liked that it was all online, so you could do it around your schedule.” Her novel is a fictionalized account of the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge that took place near Burns, Oregon, in early 2016. She studied with one cohort her entire two years in the program, workshopping their novel chapters and receiving critiques on her own rough drafts. “You’re going through this experience with a whole group of people who are all…

A VCR TAPE OF JANE FONDA’S WORKOUT from the 1980s. An orange finger puppet in the shape of an octopus tentacle. A black and silver artificial larynx. Visitors to the Instagram journal The Keepthings can see and read about all of these objects…plus so many more. Deborah Way was an editor at O, the Oprah Magazine for 15 years, until the print magazine closed. In April 2021, she launched The Keepthings with the subtitle “stories of the things we keep to keep our dear dead with us.” She asks potential contributors to submit the story of an object and the person it’s connected to in 600 words or fewer, along with photos of the object. “I think of them as love stories told through objects,” Way says. “Some of them…